The Beginning of Wisdom
"This is the statute of learning that was commanded by God: tell the children of Israel to bring you a pure red cow that has no blemish, that upon which no yoke has been laid." – Numbers 19:2
The burning of a red cow to create ashes that purify those who have been with a dead body has long been seen by the people of the Bible as the oddest of the Bible’s commands. The irrational or unusual aspects of the ritual are legion. The cow must be “pure” red, such that even two hairs next to one another of any color other than red are enough to invalidate it, making the existence of a red cow an occurrence so rare that it only happened seven times. Cedar wood, hyssop, and scarlet wool are added to the fire that burns the cow’s body, though such additions are nowhere else mentioned for any of the other numerous sacrificial services ordained by the Bible. None of the other sacrifices (other than the scape goat, which has its own oddities) take place outside of the camp. And, oddest of all, those who mix the cow’s ashes in water are themselves made impure.
There is no shortage of Jewish commentary around these rites. Explanations offered by Rambam (a warning against paganism), Rashi (“because Satan and the nations taunt Israel, saying, ‘What is this command and what reason is there for it?’”) and Ramban (a teaching about the integrity of nature) contain a whiff of response to the theological accusations often leveled at Jews. For Christians (who cast off laws like sacrifice), Muslims (who claim that the Bible is a forgery) and pagans (who disputed the coherence of an all powerful God) all once had1 their reasons for disparaging rites like those of the red cow.
The result was that Jews were once often forced to argue on behalf of their faith. From European court disputations to the use by pagan Roman authorities in ancient Judea of Biblical quotes to justify torture and execution, Biblical passages like that of the red cow once held murderous significance.
Today, however, few Jews fear the same kind of persecution.
Now, those committed to a Biblical vision face a challenge that is both less pointed and more profound. Measured in some ways, there is far more study today of the Bible than there has ever been. Yet ignorance of the basics of the Bible is also probably far more widespread than it has been since Christianity’s conquest of Europe more than a thousand years ago. Instead then of people encountering the Bible through study or instruction, an increasing many in the secularizing lands encounter the book not at all, dismissing it as a collection of fairy tales unworthy of serious consideration.
Yet this challenge in its way also points directly to the oddity of the red cow. Because those who dismiss the Bible do hit on a telling point, which is that Biblical faith sometimes demands acceptance of things that seem as strange and unlikely as the existence of fairies. From the grand scene of the opening of the Red Sea to the more prosaic delivery of water to Hagar as the infant Ishmael cried out close to death from dehydration, belief that the Bible is true does demand belief in that which seems to be obviously untrue. And for anyone interested in taking the Bible seriously as a system of beliefs and practices this cuts most deeply when the seemingly fantastical is found in those specific, directed commands of God for which rational justification seems impossible.
How then can belief in the Bible, today, as a document with continued relevance for governing the daily affairs of individuals and communities be squared with the inclusion of commands like that of the red cow?
Medieval or ancient answers don’t suffice, for the modern says first that only that which can be empirically measured or is logically consistent has any claim to truth, and, tiring of that, that truth itself is at best relative, unknowable, constructed by language, and, as such, an expression only of power relations. As the influential French philosopher Michele Foucault put it, “There is no truth outside of power.” Meaning that it is only the powerful in any society who determine what the members of that society can even comprehend as true, as it is they, the powerful, who determine the language in which our feeble attempts at self-expression must be conducted. In this way of thinking, the only truth something like the commandment of the red cow can offer us is a “discourse” that determined who was in charge of the society that created the Bible and how they maintained that control.
But herein lies the great promise of our disordered age, for in the turn away from received wisdom and tradition we may have found the bottom of our collective nihilism. Foucault has now been dead for nearly forty years, and while those who wield his insights have achieved a stunning degree of political power, no one has found anything more to say about the matter of truth than Foucault did. Contemporary popularizers like Sam Harris move carefully around an illusion of truth that attempts to neither wholly endorse scientific materialism or Foucault’s deconstruction of truth, but that half solution lacks depth, courage, or coherence. Other contemporary answers seem to fold into a kind of evolutionary truth endorsed by other kinds of popularizers like Jordan Peterson, but as a truth claim that simply takes us back to the problem Foucault became famous for trying to disentangle.
There is however a vision of truth that cuts more deeply into first things. Its best statement is I believe contained in the simple language of Psalm 110, which speaks as plainly as can be of God’s great deeds and laws as “well-founded for all eternity, wrought of truth and equity” and closes with the oft-repeated words,
The beginning of wisdom is reverence for the Lord. Good understanding comes to all who practice it.
The message: God represents all that is beyond the meager understandings of intelligent primates. The Bible is an eternal message of love and instruction on behalf of that God, who buried within His book commands like those of the red cow, who in their unintelligibility teach us that though it is beyond man to know all that is true, it is within our grasp to live by that truth.